Gather all of your pretty suicide things, Sylvia. Lace up your boots, smooth your crinoline and tie up your hair.

I.

She crouched in tattered ribbon outside his door with her eyelids factory-sealed as he pulled her in by the hand. She did not open them again until the Chinese New Year.

They fell together like a puzzle and he stroked her hair and said her name in many languages. Lazy tongue, running letters together so exquisitely like bee blood honey. He tasted familiar like cigarettes and unfamiliar like rebirth. A praying mantis who would not pray, puffing clods of infant spiders into the air with every draw of smoke.

An anti-statistic.

Is this mine? stomach piercing notion like the poles pinching together the earth. Can such cunning ever fit into my hands? Will it burn me? Will I crush it?

And so she held him in her hands. And so she was burned. And he was not so fragile as he looked.  

II.

Ted and Sylvia sat nose-to-nose in the breakfront and unhinged their heads, littered them with pungent, saltshaker colors. When they emerged from the darkness, they found the room had become more overgrown than they had left it; marquee trees and fairy tale sized vegetation. He was made of television and Sylvia watched him compose with his shoulders perfectly hunched, she all supine and sweetly sick in her rag doll dress.

Sylvia memorized his poems and pretended they were written for her. Sylvia imagined that when she rasped them into his ear it was her breath that caused him to shiver and not his own gut shot words. She sang death rattle lullabies to him and he slept. She traced the street map lines of his furrowed brow to the river where she’d drowned when she was Virginia. He slept and she dragged the needle from beneath the skin of his arm and asked if he was dead and when he did not answer, she knew he was not.

“I hope he murders us,” he had said. But when the room went black and she reached for his hand…

[Classified truth: I secretly did not want to die there, either.]


III.

Ted and Sylvia played hangman on the slick bones of his hands

On foreheads

On paper lunch bags

He etched her bones with a sharp ink pen, deeply enough that the pyre would not devour his verse. She built him a circus so he would be kept busy while she was away.

They scaled minarets and in the shadow of metropolis light he breathed apocalypse dreams into her ear. They reined from thrones of corrugated steel over backwards billboards with their vagabond robes reflected in filth sparkle windows. They painted vibrant armageddon on air heady with ricenoodles/deaddogs and he told her that on judgment day they will not remove the global tracking devices before handing you the plate all sticky sweet, toxicwaste orange.

[they made-believe a struggle to discern why they were compelled to spend all of their grown up hours playing children’s games.]

On the day they were betrayed by the sun and all of the other planets revolving around them, he forgot to tether her plane.  She wrote in the condensation on the window

We’re taking off now. /

I don’t want to say it again. /

I hope they find this.  

She realized as the ground ascended that she’d never really held the city in her palm, because he was the city, no matter how small it looked from his rooftop or her rocket ship.


IV.

When Sylvia missed him she did not think of filling her cheeks with oven gas coma or stepping off the edge of the planet with her pockets all weighted by stars. When Sylvia missed him she created him. Exquisite scarecrow corpse, junkman Frankenstein fantasy, crafted of corrugated cardboard and coat hangers and discarded soup cans with a crooked, dimpled smile stabbed into the tin.

She covered her eyes and ventured, in ruffled prairie skirts and tousled hair, to the fallow wheat plains of his stomach. His lovely stomach, all wispy and taut and softsharp like rain churned skies. She crouched in the frozen blue of his eyes, pick-cracked his ice irises and shivered there for hours with her hands clutching a line tethering an empty hook.

She looked up and was surrounded by the crumbling columns of his stone ribs, still stained from when the christians feasted on lions.

She reposed in a whorl of rich, colored smoke and yards of tapestry, waiting to be desiccated his desert rasp sigh as sand whipped against the tent and gypsies passed outside with their coins and beads a-jangle. She exhaled chic cigarettes and watched the vapor coil through the winding, cobbled alleyways of his ear. She traveled in circus wagons, each night walking the tight-rope lines of his palms high above the whispering crowd and roaring ring master.

She became one of Kipling's savages, parted his frond lips and crept into his balmy jungle mouth, listening expectantly for a low, feral growl. She saw witch doctors chant and dance and incant to the primal drum of his heart. She took wrong turns in crooked forests and panicked when she found her wrists all caught in the spider silk legacy of his hair.

Her face was cast in shadow by his skyscraper bones, leaving her wondering after the darkness of the city. His eyebrows drew together in thought and she knew it was due to the same wind that had forced too too too much oxygen into her lungs at once.

V.

The cannibal who ran the projector; he understood, and he wanted to know what god tasted of.

The pauper jew; he understood, and he wanted to know what it was like to be reduced to a souvenir.


VI.

When his ink carousel-ed down the drain it hurt like it would hurt like it ought to hurt like it does hurt to sear off her very skin.

We are nothing at all without our words. And so, we are nothing at all.

And in the end there was no resolution or
revolution or
restitution or
binary as pertains to astronomy/as pertains to metallurgy/as pertains to human genome sequencing

And in the end, Sylvia sealed all of the cracks in the kitchen wall with duct tape and towels to keep the children safe.

Sylvia tuned the stove dial to lachrymatory gas.

Sylvia opened the oven door.

VII.

And in the end, Sylvia sighed hydrocarbon

as for him she baked

an apple pie.